The heavy bush, in these northern districts, is divisible into two kinds. There is the kauri bush and the mixed bush. The first, as its name implies, is forest where the kauri grows alone, or, at least, preponderates. It has already been described. It is something solemn and tremendous in the last degree, grand and gloomy, and even awful. There are but few trees produced anywhere in the world that can rival the mammoth kauri in bulk. When we consider the closeness with which the trees stand, the uniform mightiness of their endless ranks, stretching on over hill and dale for many a mile, it is not easy to say where we may look to find anything to match or compare with kauri bush.
The mixed bush is very different. Here one is in an actual land of enchantment. Uniformity is gone; unending variety is in place of it. The eye is almost wearied with delight, wonder, and admiration at all around, for there is ever something new, something to prevent the sense of monotony growing up in the mind.
The trees are not of one size, any more than of one kind. Their maximum girth and height fall considerably below that of the largest kauri. Still, one may see kahikatea, kawaka, kotukutuku, matai, miro, pukatea, puriri, rata, rimu, taraire, totara, and many another, whose girth may be as much as thirty feet and more, perhaps; and that may attain a hundred feet or more of height before "heading." Nor are these trees but so many columns. There are trees that branch all round with great domes of foliage. There are some that send several huge limbs upshooting to the sky. There are crooked trees, gnarled trees, bare trees and richly covered ones, leaning trees and fallen trees, a confusion and profusion of arboreal forms.
There is exuberant vegetation above, around, below. Waist-deep in a rich, rare fernery you stand, and, if you have an artistic soul, gaze rapturously about you. From the heights you peer down into the gullies, look abroad over distant sweeps of river, glance through vistas of greenery, over panoramas of wild woodland beauty, carrying your sight away to the far-off hills bathed in sunshine; and all is mantled with the glorious woods.
The mighty trunks and monster limbs of the trees about you are covered with huge masses of moss, shrouded in climbing ivy-ferns, festooned with flowering creepers, and covered with natural hanging gardens to their lofty summits. Around you are the varied forms and colours of more than a hundred different shrubs and trees, evergreen, and flower-bearing in their seasons. There is the cabbage-tree palm, with bare shank and top-knot; the nikau palm, with weird and wondrous frondage; the lancewood, upright and slender, with crest of copper-tinted hair-like leaves; the fern-tree, a vast umbrella of emerald green. There is the twisting squirming rata; the gaunt and powerful kahikatea; the golden kowhai; the dark velvet-covered rimu; the feathery red tawai; the perfumy mangiao; and more that it would take days to particularize. Flowers of bright tint load the trees or shrubs that bear them—scarlet, white, crimson, orange, yellow, blue; and hanging creepers shower festooned cataracts of foliage and blossom down from middle air. And everywhere are ferns, ferns, ferns! abundant, luxuriant, and of endless variety.